This book investigates female Muslims pilgrimage practices and how these relate to women’s mobility, social relations, identities, and the power structures that shape women’s lives. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regional expertise, it offers in-depth investigation of the gendered dimensions of Muslim pilgrimage and the life-worlds of female pilgrims. With a variety of case studies, the contributors explore the experiences of female pilgrims to Mecca and other pilgrimage sites, and how these are embedded in historical and current contexts of globalisation and transnational mobility. This volume will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across pilgrimage, gender, religious, and Islamic studies.

Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra storytelling. Contributors Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.

When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don't usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world. Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th-century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse. Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them. Perfect for readers interested in gender, Islam, travel writing, and global history, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women provides invaluable insight into how these daring women experienced the world—in their own voices.

This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonizing and queering approaches to Central Asia. The volume’s discussion of More-than-Human Worlds, Everyday Economies, Material Culture, Migration and Statehood engages core analytical concerns such as globalization, inequality and postcolonialism. Far more than a survey of a ‘world region’, the volume illuminates how people in Central Asia make a life at the intersection of diverse cross-cutting currents and flows of knowledge. In so doing, it stakes out the contribution of an anthropology of and from Central Asia to broader debates within contemporary anthropology. This is an essential reference for anthropologists as well as for scholars from other disciplines with a focus on Central Asia

Introduction: Muslim pilgrimage through the lens of women's new mobilities / Marjo Buitelaar, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, and Viola Thimm -- 1. Under male supervision? Nationality, age and Islamic belief as basis for Muslim women's pilgrimage / Viola Thimm -- 2. Young Moroccan-Dutch women on hajj: Claiming female space / Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany & Marjo Buitelaar -- 3. Power in Moroccan women's narratives of the hajj / Kholoud Al-Ajarma -- 4. Shiʻi Muslim women's pilgrimage rituals to Lady Fatemeh-Masoumeh's shrine in Qom / Ladan Rahbari -- 5. Israeli Dead Sea cosmetics and charity for Palestinian children: Indonesian women's shopping activities while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem / Mirjam Lücking -- 6. 'Clothing cannot improve moral behaviour': Pilgrimage, fashion, and entrepreneurship in a West African market / Erin Kenny -- 7. Considering the silences: Understanding historical narratives of women's Indian Ocean hajj mobility / Jacqueline H. Fewkes -- 8. Bosnian women on hajj / Dženita Karić -- 9. In the 'Land of Wonders': Bint Al-Shāṭiʼ's pilgrimage: The hajj and the construction of reformist religiosity / Richard van Leeuwen -- 10. Stepping in the footsteps of Hajar to bring home the hajj: Dialogical positioning in Asra Nomani's memoir Standing Alone / Marjo Buitelaar -- Glossary.

Islam has been corrupted. A virulent strain of the religion manifests itself in bloodthirsty mutations such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and the terrifying spectre of ISIS. But behind the atrocities and turmoil lie many different versions and visions of Islam, each struggling to survive in a rapidly changing world. Ziauddin Sardar, with inimitable wit and intelligence, chronicles the diversity and richness of Islam and, in doing so, answers a host of frequently asked questions: Is Islam inherently violent and misogynistic? Why do young men and women choose to join the jihadi caliphate? What part should Muhammad's teachings play in our own times? Islam Beyond the Violent Jihadis argues for a pluralistic and reflective religion with a distinguished past - but one that appears to have been wrenched from its noble origins by rigid fundamentalism. In examining how we have nourished the rise of Islamic jihadi groups, Sardar urges us all to work together to preserve the sanity of our world.

Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in the more mundane moments of their lives. Drawing on interviews with Muslims in Montreal and St. John’s, Selby, Barras, and Beaman examine moments in which religiosity is worked out. They critique the model of reasonable accommodation, which has been lauded internationally for acknowledging and accommodating religious and cultural differences. The authors suggest that it disempowers religious minorities by implicitly privileging Christianity and by placing the onus on minorities to make requests for accommodation. The interviewees show that informal negotiation occurs all the time; scholars, however, have not been paying attention. This book advances a new model for studying the navigation and negotiation of religion in the public sphere and presents an alternative picture of how religious difference is woven into the fabric of Canadian society.

Questioning the conventional depiction of India as a nation divided between religious communities, Gottschalk shows that individuals living in India have multiple identities, some of which cut across religious boundaries. The stories narrated by villagers living in the northern state of Bihar depict everyday social interactions that transcend the simple divide of Hindu and Muslim.

A landmark volume on the lives of Muslim women across a century of rapid change, restoring lost voices and enriching our picture of British society.

Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, is a surprising example of ethnic harmony in a region dominated by conflict. A recent trend toward integration of its historical Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Muslim quarters however, has disrupted the harmony. In Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth, Chad F. Emmett provides penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the structure of Nazareth’s quarters and the relations between its ethnic communities. Emmett describes both the positive and negative effects of Nazareth’s residential patterns. He shows that the addition of new and ethnically mixed quarters has promoted mixed schools, joint holiday celebrations, a common political culture, and social networks that cross ethnic boundaries. But he also finds that tensions exist among Christian groups and between Muslims and Christians in regard to intersectarian marriages, religious conversion, attempts to establish a joint Christian cemetery, and the emergence of a local Islamic party. Extensive interviews with leaders of religious groups, political parties, and residents reveal the way in which members of each ethnic community perceive one another. A survey of 300 families gives a wealth of details about the make-up of Nazareth’s population, including residential histories, religion, level of religious conviction, friendship and shopping patterns, and much more. Fourteen maps trace changes in the distribution of religious groups and political affiliation in Nazareth from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Beyond the Basilica will interest cultural geographers, historians, demographers, political scientists, and anyone who would like to learn more about an ethnically divided community in the residents cooperate more than they fight.